Democratic Party
The Democratic Party is a political party in the United States. Democratic Party in Southern Victory (upper left), James Madison (upper middle), and James Monroe (upper right) were members of the so-called Virginia Dynasty, and the Democratic Party remained the party of Southern interests throughout the period before the War of Secession. The last antebellum Democratic President, James Buchanan (middle left) refused to take action to prevent the Southern states from seceding and forming the Confederate States. After the war, Democrats such as Horatio Seymour (center) and Samuel J. Tilden (middle right) remained very soft on the Confederate States, ultimately leading a frustrated electorate to reject the party in the 1880 election. After the War of Secession and the subsequent dissolution of the Republican Party, the Democrats reinvented themselves as the party of Remembrance, nominating such strong nationalists as Thomas Brackett Reed (lower left), Alfred Thayer Mahan(lower middle), and finally Theodore Roosevelt (lower right), the Great War victor who is widely considered the greatest President in American history.]]The Democratic Party is a conservative political party in the United States. It dominated American politics from 1852 to 1920. Prior to the War of Secession, the Democratic Party was friendly to Southern interests, and after the war, advocated taking a soft line against the Confederate States. This position was ultimately rejected by American voters with the 1880 election of Republican James G. Blaine. Following the Second Mexican War, and the dissolution of the Republican Party with Abraham Lincoln's defection to the Socialist Party, the Democrats were able to outflank the Republicans on the issue of Remembrance, and they adopted a hard line foreign policy and the gearing of the entire US society to nationalism and revanchism. This plan came to fruition in the Great War. Following the Great War, the Socialist Party got political mileage by attacking the Democrats' economic and labor policies. In 1920 President Roosevelt was defeated by Upton Sinclair, and the Democrats would win only one more election before 1940. However, the Democrats began to look more attractive when Jake Featherston became Confederate president and took an extremely hard line against the US. The Democrats opposed the Richmond Agreement and the ensuing plebiscites in Sequoyah, Houston, and Kentucky. They were proven correct when Featherston used the Agreement as a casus belli to invade the US. However, as the Socialists supported the Second Great War with enthusiasm equal to that of the Democrats', taking advantage of the rising tide of nationalism in the US electorate proved difficult. A Partial List of Democratic Presidents * Thomas Jefferson 1801-1809 * James Madison 1809-1817 * James Monroe 1817-1825 * Andrew Jackson 1829-1837 * Martin Van Buren 1837-1841 * James K. Polk 1845-1849 * Franklin Pierce 1853-1857 * James Buchanan 1857-1861 * Horatio Seymour 1865-1869 * Samuel J. Tilden 1877-1881 * Alfred Thayer Mahan 1889-1897 * Thomas Brackett Reed 1897-1901 * Theodore Roosevelt 1913-1921 * Herbert Hoover 1933-1937 Prominent Democrats in Southern Victory * William Borah * John C. Calhoun * Samuel Clemens * Calvin Coolidge * George Custer * Josephus Daniels * Jefferson Davis * Stephen Douglas * Abner Dowling * Sylvia Enos * Barry Goldwater * Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. * Joseph P. Kennedy * Robert Lansing * George McClellan * Irving Morrell * John Pershing * Cicero Pittman * Foster Stearns * Robert Taft * William Howard Taft * Leonard Wood Democratic Party in Worldwar Democratic Party Democratic Party